1 small town, 2 distinct brothers

WALLACE - Next time you drive into this tiny town on Highway 12, on the far west edge of Calaveras County, let it remind you we might easily be debating Wallacism rather than Darwinism.

Dana M. Nichols

WALLACE - Next time you drive into this tiny town on Highway 12, on the far west edge of Calaveras County, let it remind you we might easily be debating Wallacism rather than Darwinism.

At least so says historian Sal Manna in an article coming out in the July issue of Las Calaveras, the quarterly magazine of the Calaveras County Historical Society.

Manna started out simply to learn the history of the naming of Wallace. His efforts took him through piles of newspapers and other documents from the 1800s, including letters in the archives of the Natural History Museum in London.

In the process, he discovered that the widely published belief that Wallace is named for John Herbert Wallace, the surveyor whose name appears on the 1883 map of the town site, is wrong. Wallace actually is named for John Wallace, John Herbert Wallace's father.

Manna also discovered that John Wallace the elder, a well-known engineer and surveyor in San Joaquin and Calaveras counties who is buried in Stockton, played a very small but key role in one of the major scientific developments of the 1800s: the theory of natural selection and its role in evolution.

That is because John Wallace, born 1819, at the tender age of 11 pulled his brother Alfred Russel Wallace, then 7, out of the River Beane in England and prevented him from drowning.

Alfred Wallace grew up to be one of the century's leading naturalists, traveling the world to study bugs and animals from Borneo to the Amazon. He was a contemporary of Charles Darwin's and independently developed a theory of how natural selection leads to the evolution of species. Alfred Wallace published his work first but always admitted when speaking on the matter that Darwin had figured it out first.

While Alfred Wallace went off to net butterflies in the jungle, John Wallace headed to the California Gold Rush. After he failed as a miner, he succeeded as an engineer and surveyor, working for water companies and railroads. He moved to Stockton in 1865 and in 1868 won election to the post of San Joaquin County surveyor.

When Darwin died in 1882, Alfred Wallace was one of his 10 pallbearers.

In 1887, while giving a series of lectures in the United States, Alfred Wallace came to Stockton, and the two brothers saw each other for the first time in 40 years. They traveled to Calaveras Big Trees and Yosemite, and Alfred Wallace gave a lecture on evolution in Stockton that was "warmly applauded," according to the June 2, 1887, issue of the Stockton Daily Independent.

The conversations between the two long-separated brothers must have been lively at times because of their very different views on religion and politics. Alfred Wallace was a devout socialist who pushed for higher wages. He was a vegetarian, liked to attend séances, believed women should have the right to vote and advocated ideas that today would be considered those of an environmentalist. John Wallace was a Republican who once wrote to his brother that if workers were unable to support their families, it was likely because they "lost time through their drunkenness and violence." John Wallace was also a "steadfast member of the Episcopal Church," Manna wrote.

Manna said he believes that the wide-open opportunities of California were what gave John Wallace such a different worldview from Alfred Wallace, who spent most of his life amid more-constrained conditions in England.

"You read the letters, and you read the autobiography of Alfred Russell, and you understand it," Manna said.